FORD AND HONDA GO FROM FAILURE TO SUCCESS

Where did cars get their names from? Many inventors used their surname to front the product; Henry Ford and Soichiro Honda are prime examples.

Henry Ford was born in 1863 and despite being born in America his father was of Irish descent. Ford failed with his early business, in the early 1900’s Ford’s company was dissolved due to the low quality, high priced vehicles. This left him broke and it wasn’t for many years later that he founded the successful Ford Motor Company.

Ford has produced some amazing vehicles with the Ford Focus and Ford Fiesta being top sellers in the UK last year.

Soichiro Honda didn’t have much luck the first time round either, with a series of failures. Honda was born in Japan in 1906 and had always had a keen interest in automobiles, applying for a job with Toyota. Toyota turned him down, leaving him without a job for a number of years, yet this misfortune lead him to build his own business which in turn is very successful.

Today Honda has a range of cars, with the Honda Jazz reaching the top 10 cars in 2009.

Yet Ford was not the first to design and build an automobile, this was a man named Karl Benz. Benz a German engineer was born in 1844. He was the first person to market his vehicle and they went on sale in late 1888.

Holly Harper of Britannia Driving School said: “Despite these inventors initial failures their inventions are very much part of modern society today.”

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